


down comes the night

by hintricate



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon Fix-It, Slow Burn, a romantic comedy of sorts, discussions of mental health and sexuality and past abuse, everyone lives (eventually), two forty year old men getting their act together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24594010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hintricate/pseuds/hintricate
Summary: “You gonna be tired tomorrow? It’s not past your bedtime?”“I think I can stay up a little longer,” says Eddie dryly. “But just a little. When the clock hits twelve, my carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”This time he feels the aftershocks of Richie’s mirth jostle him, charging skin-deep and farther. Richie mimes holding up a glass slipper for Eddie’s appraisal. Eddie shoots him a withering glare but has to turn and hide his face in his own shoulder as it crumbles into fondness.[After Derry, Eddie starts running toward something. A new future, which inevitably includes Richie.]
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	down comes the night

**Author's Note:**

> I've had the idea for this story lingering in my head for months. It started out a much shorter premise: five conversations over the course of five summer nights. But I decided to expand it because I couldn't help myself. No defined posting schedule, but it should be five chapters total if I stick to my outline.
> 
> The title comes from Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain." Chapter titles come from The National's "Carin at the Liquor Store" - which gave me my initial inspiration for this fic. Hope you enjoy!

The night after the world almost ends, Eddie and Richie share breakfast for dinner at the half-remodeled diner on the dusty outskirts of town. It’s past ten by the time they’re finished. Outside, Derry’s streets are dark and barren, the buildings all shrunken into one another, caught at the end of deep inhalation. Silence hangs in the air thick as molasses on the walk back to the townhouse, honeyed and gripping with sticky tendrils at Eddie’s ankles.

“It’s weird,” Eddie says. “It feels like it should be different now.” Lighter, more teeming with life. Less like a ghost town sucked into the far wrinkled corner of a map.

Richie hums, low, and shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. His leather jacket must be back in his room somewhere, ruined from the scabby congealed mess of blood it had soaked up hours earlier. He kicks at some pebbles on the road, and they skip off with little clicks into the nearby sewer grate. 

Eddie knows that he feels different. Over the past few decades, there’d been an invisible chain coiled in tight loops around his chest. He hadn’t noticed its presence until he got the call from Mike, and then it became shamefully tangible: the lead digging into his skin, hunching his shoulders and weighing his whole body down. Eddie had been slogging through his unhappy life with his unhappy job and tense, unhappy marriage as the metal constricted more and more snugly with each passing year. 

As they approach the townhouse, Eddie spots a smattering of faint pink lines drawn across the asphalt. Chalk outline of a hopscotch game. Richie jumps through it, hopping from one foot to another and landing hard on the other side, staggering. A brief image flares in Eddie’s mind: Richie falling and smashing his legs on the fractured rock of the cistern, the whites of the Deadlights dissipating in a fog from his eyes.

In the present, Richie finds his footing. Spins around and takes a bow. Eddie offers him a slow clap, dripping with as much sarcasm as he can muster in the late humid night. The mundanity of it is nearly too unreal to bother.

“Congratulations, you’re the most freakishly tall six year old I’ve ever met,” Eddie tells him.

Richie laughs. The sound tumbles out of his mouth loud and easy, and a soft warmth unfurls somewhere behind Eddie’s ribs, tests the boundaries, settles down in the bundle of satisfied comfort it finds there. 

“Can’t complain about that,” Richie says. “As long as I’m the best at something.” And then he tilts his head up and adds, “Look at this shit, Eds.”

Eddie looks. In the dull light, he can just make out the curving edge of Richie’s jaw, the speckles of hair left blunt and unshaved from their morning spent stumbling out of the collapsing wreck of Neibolt. The lines of his throat tighten and shift as he swallows. 

Eddie looks, but not long enough for Richie to look back. Instead he turns his face higher up to the sky, where the indigo sprawl hangs over them in impenetrable suspension, bigger than Derry and their fragile victory, dotted with the white perforations of stars. The stars are all dead, that’s the common saying. But he’d heard an astrophysicist say on TV once that it’s a misconception. Most of the stars visible to the human eye are still alive, burning at the dark however many light years away. 

“Yeah, it’s nice,” Eddie says.

Richie snorts. “Man of few words tonight?”

“Shut up.” Eddie frowns. “I’m taking it all in.” 

“Well, fuck, don’t let me interrupt.” Carefully, Richie lowers himself to sit on the curb in front of the townhouse. He sighs, prolonged, then raises his eyebrows at Eddie and pats the concrete next to him. “Why don’t you take it all in from down here?”

Eddie crosses his arms. “You want me to hunker on the sidewalk? With the bugs and the bird shit? When was the last time you think someone took a power hose to this place?”

“Man, I saw your suitcase. You and I both know you’ve gotta have at least seven pairs of neatly folded business slacks packed away in that beast.”

“Fuck you, I’m wearing jeans right now.”

Richie laughs again. “Eddie, c’mon. Are you really gonna make me keep asking? I would eat off this sidewalk.”

“You _have_ eaten off this sidewalk,” Eddie counters. Weary, he brushes a hand over his face, distressingly aware of all the forty years of his life. If he glanced in a mirror right now, he’d be confronted by stark purple bags under his eyes, crow’s feet, deep-set wrinkles and a downturned mouth. “That one time when we were twelve and you dropped your ice cream on the ground. You just scooped it up with your hand and licked it off.”

“And yet,” Richie says, ”even with my deeply held loyalty to the logic of the five second rule, I’m still alive and kicking!” He reaches out and tugs at the lace of Eddie’s sneaker so that the tie comes unfastened and trails off the side. 

Falling for it, Eddie kicks at him. All habit. “Prick.”

“Settle down, young lad,” Richie orders him again, doing a voice. Eddie can’t quite discern what it might be. It sounds a bit like Fagin from _Oliver!_ , but more old-moneyed. In his regular pitch, he asks, “Don’t you wanna get rough and tumble with me?”

Eddie studies Richie then, his dirty, unkempt hair and cracked glasses and grinning mouth that trembles at the left corner, just a little, just enough to note if watching closely. And Eddie is watching closely. 

After they all returned from the quarry, they’d agreed in mutual slurred exhaustion to spend the rest of the day crashing in their beds and talk about whatever needed talking about tomorrow. Eddie had slumped upstairs to his new room and into the shower, tipped his chin up to the choking spray, itching for it. When he began drifting into unconsciousness standing up, liable to slip and smack his head on the porcelain tub, he turned off the water and crawled into bed, thinking he’d sleep all the way through to the next morning. Longer than he’d let himself sleep in years.

Still Eddie had found himself blinking awake in the evening, delirious and fearfully unknowing until Richie’s knock came at the door, muted, hesitant, not wishing to wake Eddie if he was asleep. 

He’d understood in that moment that this was why he’d woken up at all: he was tuned into Richie, anticipating his movements and intentions, poised to respond to him, that senseless connection palpable again after all these years. If his conscious brain was a little clumsy at it, or perhaps shy, his body remembered.

When he cracked open the door, Richie had been standing there, shadowed and gaunt along his cheekbones from the light of the hall window spilling over his face and tinting him near-blue. Eddie expected him to say something like: do you want to get a drink downstairs with me? 

He couldn’t recall why. It might have been the way Richie dove for the hard liquor the second Bev told them about her death visions. The idea of it, though, was appealing. It reminded him of that game some couples had of pretending to be other people for a night, meeting at a bar and discreetly sliding over a room key, calling each other strangers' names as they made love, just for the fervent thrill of the act.

“Can’t sleep,” Richie told him. The words ran together with resignation. “You want to find something to eat around this place?”

Eddie had opened the door a bit wider, shuffling back in his travel slippers. “If you eat this late, you’ll mess up your digestive system,” he warned. 

“I hate to break it to you, but this is far from the first time I’ve had dinner past six-thirty. Or the worst thing that’s fucked with my bowels today.” 

“Is that supposed to surprise me?”

Richie rocked towards Eddie, an absent swaying motion, and then back again. “I can just go by myself. Leave you to it.”

Eddie had already begun unfolding a new set of clothes onto the comforter. As he plucked spare cash from his wallet, his wedding ring glinted under the bedside lamp, startling him. He held up his hand and tilted it back and forth to watch the band gleam, listening to Richie shift around behind him. 

“No,” Eddie said. “No, I’ll go with you.”

At the diner, Eddie had been prepared to ask for something close to his usual fare, the types of meals he’d eaten with Myra in New York. A salad, limp lettuce and hold the bacon and bleu cheese, or egg whites with dry toast and veggies in place of hash browns. Glass of cold juice or milky coffee by his elbow.

But then Richie ordered a plate of french toast, and Eddie glanced at the greasy laminated menu in his hands, biting his tongue. Under a heading labelled SWEET STUFF, he saw the option for chocolate chip pancakes, unlimited, with whipped cream and butter and bacon on the side. Eddie had thought, _fuck it_ , and requested for their server to bring him that instead, ignoring Richie’s comically bug-eyed expression in his periphery.

They’d eaten it all family style, drenched in syrup and pilfering bites off of each other’s plates, and it was messy and delicious, and 80s pop music had been playing in the background, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, and they’d laughed and sniped back and forth about nothing and been utterly, painfully relieved, and Eddie had not regretted it at all, even when he ordered a second stack of pancakes and Richie said, teasing, head lolling to the side, “You gonna leave anything for the other paying customers in this fine establishment?”

A cool breeze wafts over Eddie as he stands in front of the townhouse, welcome in the heat. He closes his eyes and breathes in, then out, one, two, three times. When he opens them, Richie’s face is still turned up in his direction, his smile dimmed to something smaller and unbearably expectant. Waiting, again, for Eddie to make his choice, which had already been made the moment Richie asked him.

Eddie bends down, keeping a hand on Richie’s shoulder instead of the sidewalk as he settles next to him. The muscle there is relaxed under his palm, and he misses it when he lets go. He pulls his knees into his chest and wraps both arms around them, relishing the fullness in his stomach, the closeness of Richie along his side. Sharing heat across the inches between them. That warmth behind Eddie’s ribs pokes its head up and starts swirling around, curious.

“I’m not staying down here more than a couple minutes,” Eddie warns. “I do yoga at least twice a week, but I can’t bend this way forever.”

Amiable, Richie says, “Please tell me more about the ways you can and can’t bend. Do you use one of those home exercise videos? Are you going full doggy style in front of the TV or wriggling around in class with a bunch of big city film students?”

“You live in L.A., so you can stop fucking pretending like you don’t know it’s downward facing dog,” Eddie says. Richie cackles.

They sit in silence for a while. Upstairs, everyone is sleeping. Derry is sleeping. Beverly might be lying in Ben’s bed, or they might be in her room instead, curled around each other. It’s a pleasant night. Strange to think it, but true. It’s pleasant sitting here with Richie, alive and under the living stars.

Richie slides his foot over until it rests against the side of Eddie’s sneaker. He clears his throat and says, “I missed this.” His voice is rough, face pinched.

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees. He knocks their feet together harder, closer, so that their calves are aligned and he can feel his knuckles brush Richie’s knee through the denim leg of his pants, bone to bone. “I missed this, too.”

“You gonna be tired tomorrow? It’s not past your bedtime?”

“I think I can stay up a little longer,” says Eddie dryly. “But just a little. When the clock hits twelve, my carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”

This time he feels the aftershocks of Richie’s mirth jostle him, charging skin-deep and farther. Richie mimes holding up a glass slipper for Eddie’s appraisal. Eddie shoots him a withering glare but has to turn and hide his face in his own shoulder as it crumbles into fondness.

“Like when we were kids, remember?” Richie asks. He’s smiling down at their shoes, teeth buried in the side of his lip. “I’d beg you to stay out longer and you’d get all pissed because if you were home late, your mom would freak. But then I’d rag on you so much you’d end up hanging around for five more minutes anyway.”

“They call that peer pressure now, you know. They give lectures about it in schools.”

“Whatever, man. You always made it so easy.”

Eddie digs his fingers into his arm and considers saying that he does remember. That he’s glad he can remember things like this now. Meaningless patterns, nights that were the same as a hundred other nights, the types of memories that settle and rise up readily not because they were important at the time but because the general structure of them is so familiar and so soothing. A lullaby. He could say he doesn’t think he’s viewing it all through rose-colored glasses; things really were that good then. Not everything, but what they had together, him and Richie. Him and Richie and the other losers.

Instead he says, “I wasn’t easy. I just wanted to stick around.” 

He gets nothing in response. When Eddie can no longer stand the quiet, more strained than the companionable silence of a few minutes before, he looks over and sees that Richie is still staring at the spot where their feet are pressed together. Though his smile lingers, his eyes have fallen detached again.

Please, I brought you back, Eddie thinks. Stay here with me.

“Hey, earth to Trashmouth,” he calls. He pokes Richie hard on his bicep. “Where do you keep going?”

Richie’s head jerks up. He scratches his chin, huffing out a breath. “Now why would I be going anywhere when I’ve finally got my long lost best pal sitting next to me? Right where I want him. No escape. You were a fast kid, Eds, but I’ve had practice running from the paps in L.A., and, uh, today I guess, when we were running from—” He stops, for a hare, and then finishes: “I think I could probably catch up to you now. Especially with the weight of all that disproportionate rage slowing you down.”

“Richie,” Eddie says, and he shuts his mouth instantly. Rote response to brusque sincerity. “This morning, I almost died in a sewer.”

Beside him, Richie recoils a fraction of an inch. Blank-faced, rigid.

“I almost died,” Eddie repeats, “and then we got back and I had to stop myself three different times from going on my phone and looking up early warning signs of infections. I got dizzy just _thinking_ about it, so I went into my suitcase and got out all my fucking pills. Then, before I could take them, I changed my mind and flushed them down the fucking toilet, which just made me dizzier. And when I finally made myself get in the shower so I could clean all the shit and the blood and the quarry microbes off of my body, I almost fainted and cracked my head, which would have been an absolutely bullshit way to kick it after everything else we’ve done since getting here. But it probably would’ve been some goddamn excellent comedic timing, so, whatever, there you go, get on my fucking level.”

He punctuates this last statement with an unwitting gesture, hand thrown out and fingers splayed. Richie blinks at him. There’s a red patch to the side of his chin from where his nails dug in and left behind faint crescent-shaped indents. His bottom lip moves like he wants to speak, but nothing comes out.

Eddie looks away again. “I just think that we should be able to tell each other stuff.”

“You and me?”

“You and me. And the others,” Eddie adds. “I’m sick of never telling people anything.”

In New York, he’d seen a therapist following weeks of painstaking research that he could now admit was more procrastination than a true abundance of caution. It was just after his mother passed away. He had been a mess of suppressed, contrary feelings, despair and rage and love and resentment and other things unrecognizable decimating his attention span and making him trigger-happy with his temper. He met with Dr. Yang for four appointments, and then one day work ran late and he had to cancel. Eddie never went back, just like that. It had been simple to tell himself he was too busy for a shrink, and grief was normal; it was one of the most normal psychological processes a human being could endure. 

But he still felt that jumble of warring emotions whenever he thought too long and closely about his mother. And it would be worse if it was any of his friends. They’d already lost Stan. If one of them had died down there, how could he knit back what had been unravelled, something that couldn’t be spoken aloud for all its gruesome strangeness and horror?

He shivers, and Richie leans back into his space. Eddie jumps when Richie’s fingers land on his wrist, clasping gingerly, with peculiar delicacy. His thumb sweeps over Eddie’s pulse. Eddie feels all his muscles slacken in a wave from head to toe.

“I’m good, Eds,” Richie assures him, voice hushed. “I promise. It’s just—I don’t know. I kind of feel like my insides have been scooped out of my fucking body?”

Eddie watches Richie’s thumb move, both their hands resting together on his thigh. “Really? I wouldn’t know what that’s like. Must be terrible.”

“Alright, you little wiseass.” He casts his gaze to Eddie’s chest. Richie peers at him for so long and with such marked concentration that Eddie lifts his free palm to the spot he already knows is smooth and pale underneath his t-shirt, half-expecting to feel blood seeping through the cotton in a soggy red stain.

“I don’t know how to describe it, really,” Richie says. He drags his eyes upwards to Eddie’s face. “It’s just been, you know, a lot. Three days of absolute burning, screaming, shit-guzzling hell with no redeeming quality whatsoever.”

“I get what you mean,” Eddie says, sympathy much exaggerated. “I can’t think of a single part of the last three days that I enjoyed. Especially not the company.”

“Oh, especially not that.”

With a belated spike of displeasure, he realizes that Richie has ceased in stroking his wrist; his fingers only lie motionless on the purple veins trailing out from Eddie’s palm, clutching at him. His nails are dirty but very neat. “Fine. I’ll stop pushing it.”

“That would be a first.”

Eddie ignores this. “As long as you know you can tell me.”

“If I figure it out, Eddie my love, you’ll be the first to know,” Richie vows, and withdraws his hand. When he speaks again, it’s with a measured lightness. “Have you thought about what you’re doing tomorrow?”

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about it until morning.”

“Yeah, but then I barged into your hotel room like Prince Charming’s evil twin and dragged you away to get breakfast with me in the middle of the night—”

“It was eight p.m.”

“—So I figured maybe we could throw that rule out the window and you could just, like, be cool and not snitch on me to Billiam.” 

“First of all,” Eddie says, “you did not drag me out here. You asked me if I wanted to get something to eat with you. And I said yes, entirely of my own volition. I have a brain, I understood the parameters of your request and the consequences, which are me sitting on a dirty sidewalk listening to you go on some self-martyring tangent about how you forced me to suffer through the cruel fate of chocolate chip pancakes.”

“Yeah, because I didn’t want to be alone,” Richie bites out. “What are you gonna do, say no Richie, fuck you, fuck off to that miserable little diner alone after we—

“And, what, you think I want to be alone?” Eddie asks, whetted sharp as steel. “You think I wanted to leave my friends to go huddle in bed, trying to convince myself that Bowers is dead and not about to burst out from my shower and stab me in the face again?” 

Eddie rubs his arms, which have gone cold. His jaw throbs as he clenches his teeth.

“I was relieved when you came and asked me, okay?” he says. “Stop acting like it’s a chore for me to spend time with you.”

Richie gapes at him with his mouth open, just a bit. 

“Alright,” he says, after an eternal second. “So that’s it, then. Neither of us brittle curmudgeons want to be alone right now.”

“Great!”

“Great,” Richie echoes. “So?”

Eddie glowers without heat. “So what?”

“Are you leaving tomorrow?” Richie asks again, nudging their shoulders together. His tone is playful but there’s something else hidden in it, too, needling and skittish, rabbit near the snare. “Are you going back to New York?”

Out in the night, a bird chirps on its lonesome, a sparrow, the song fluttering through the street and instilling Eddie with an inexplicable tinge of melancholy. He doesn’t know how late it is. It must be at least past eleven. He deliberates, wanting to linger a few more minutes, wondering if it would not be more prudent for an amalgamation of bleary, half-formed reasons to go upstairs and resume this conversation later, when he’s alert and trusts himself to navigate it without wandering aimlessly into sinkholes.

“I think I might have to go back,” Eddie admits. “At least for now.”

Richie nods, his eyes trained on the pavement. “Right. No, yeah, that makes sense.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.” A tiny insect lands on the back of Eddie’s hand. He looks at it until it files its minuscule legs together and flies away. “Before I got here it was like—not fine, but I didn’t think about it being bad. I just lived it. It was what it was. And then I got on the plane and it’s like I left the version of myself I’ve been for thirty years behind. Like it wasn’t even me.” 

“That was how I felt on stage,” Richie says, “after I got the call from Mike.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley.” 

Richie blocks the jab of Eddie’s elbow before it reaches his kidney, grinning at Eddie’s belabored groan. 

“That was terrible,” Eddie informs him. “That was so, so terrible. How did they let you be a comedian? They should have a licensing exam for any job involving public entertainment.”

“Hey, don’t mess with the classics.” 

An automatic light hanging over the fly shop across the street flicks off, shrouding them in greater darkness. Eddie waits for his eyes to adjust. The dots of Richie’s pupils glint against his face, too blinding to take in directly. The sky is clear but in the distance Eddie can hear the distinct rumble of thunder. He imagines it rolling in: fat black clouds, lightning, and muggy rain, the serenity and buzzing elation of a summer storm.

A second picture comes with it: a hazy, underdeveloped shot of another night and another storm. He and Richie watching the wind sift through the leaves of the arborvitae in the Tozier backyard until it thickened and howled, and the drizzle of rain surged into a downpour. Flashes of light, booming quakes, power going out. They drank microwaved hot chocolate and knelt on the carpet, holding back the sheer ivory curtains of the living room window. Richie had made some dumb joke then, too, and Eddie had taken the bait and unleashed a tempest of pointless hot fury upon him to match the deluge outside.

They’d never had this conversation before. They’d had this conversation a million times. They would have it again, an unequivocal surety spinning out into the more murky future. Context changed, moods wavered; the step-by-step playback of joke, feigned indignation, laughter, and teasing remained sturdy and incorruptible against the battering gusts of time. 

“Think it’ll start coming down soon?” Richie asks. He zips his sweatshirt up to his sternum. The blocky text on his t-shirt peeks across his chest: _World’s Greatest Grandma_.

“Maybe.” Eddie holds his arm out, waiting for the collision of raindrops. None come.

“Should we head in?”

“Let’s see how far away it is first.”

“Shit, I forgot we used to do that!” Richie says. “What’s the rule again? Every five seconds equals a mile?”

“Very good, Richard,” Eddie says, to hear him snort. “Now kindly shut up for a minute.”

They listen. Lightning whitens the sky. Eddie counts, tall hand ticking by on his watch. Eleven seconds and the thunder crashes.

“I haven’t seen a real storm in forever.” Richie squints at the forest beyond town, like he might be able to sight the rain from that distance. “We have them in L.A. sometimes, but they’re just baby storms. Nothing like here. What’s the verdict, counselor?”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Eddie says, and then: “We have time. What were you saying?”

“Huh?”

“About Mike’s call?” Eddie reminds him. “Going on stage and feeling like it wasn’t you?” 

Richie exhales, the breath mutating into wry laughter at the end. It occurs to Eddie that he may have changed the subject on purpose. 

“Remember what I told you guys at Jade of the Orient?” he asks. “About throwing up?”

“Yeah.” The table had gone quiet with the confession. Eddie thinks of how he had ducked forward in concern, involuntary, as he did at thirteen when Richie stayed out all afternoon in the wet chill and then came to school the next day complaining of a sore throat.

“Well,” Richie says, “it happened twice. I’ll give you three guesses where.”

“You didn’t.”

“I can assure you I very much did. The first time was outside the venue, like, the second after I hung up. My manager had to give me his handkerchief.” He scrubs a hand over one eye. “But then I walked in there, and I got so fucking nervous, man. They were all staring up at me with these shapeless faces, waiting for me to say the same dumbass jokes I’ve been telling since I was twenty-six, and I couldn’t—” He falters. “I just threw up again. Right in front of my hundreds of adoring fans.”

“Jesus,” Eddie says, feeling his own eyes widen and round.

“I could hear the shutter on someone’s iPhone go off. Why the hell would you keep your sound on during a comedy show?” Richie shakes his head slowly. “That’s the bigger social faux pa, if you’re asking me.”

Eddie laughs. “You were some dude’s viral wet dream. He went to that show expecting dick jokes and walked out with a hundred thousand likes on Twitter.”

“Went out on a real high note,” Richie says. “But, yeah, uh. I haven’t been that nervous to stand in front of an audience in years. It felt like I was asleep and my soul was crashing back into my body.” He rubs his palms together, the way one does over a fire for warmth. “You know how they talk about near death experiences? People hovering in the air over their own empty husks of meat?”

“Maybe we’ve both just been empty husks of meat for twenty seven years, is that what you’re saying?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Richie recites, tone mysterious. He performs a short approximation of the X-Files theme song, drumming his fingers on his thighs. “Look on the bright side. If that show ever comes back on, I’ll send in a spec script. I can give up comedy for good and jumpstart my newfound career as a screenwriter. And,” his cadence lowers to a whisper, “I could probably give Bill a run for his money. Rumor has it a lot of his movies are pretty fucking shitty.”

“Are you kidding?” Eddie demands. “A giant clown spider stomping around a cave while two FBI agents bully it to death? It would get, like, two-point-six stars on IMDB.”

“No way, dude,” Richie says. “So many of those Monster-of-the-Week episodes were already batshit; a dancing clown that eats kids wouldn’t even make a dent in the pile of head-scratchers. Plus, think of the atmosphere! The romance! Lost memories, some poor soul impaled in the sewers, Scully and Mulder getting caught in the rain—” He cuts himself off, hand frozen in mid-air as he gestures. He drops it to his knee. “I think I could make it work, you know, with all this creative genius I’ve been hoarding away the past two decades. ”

“You’re a real visionary,” Eddie says, terse. “Have you ever actually seen one of Bill’s films?”

“I think I did a couple years ago, yeah. _Sleepy Lake_. God. Almost three hours in this old, tiny theater with my co-star who kept trying to hit me with fun facts about its production, or whatever the fuck. I thought it would never end.” Richie screws up his face and mimics, quite stuffy: “Did you know that they used real algae in this scene, Richie? Have you noticed that’s the actress from _Breaking Bad_ , the blond one screaming?”

“Like you’ve never talked during a movie before.”

“Yeahhh, Eddie, only everything I say is great,” Richie retorts. “People beg me to keep talking. They say, ‘oh, Richard, won’t thou bestow more of your superb commentary about how those tentacles look like another type of floppy appendage upon us?’”

“There you go with the dick jokes again,” Eddie says.

“I told you not to mess with the classics.” Richie cranes his head to his shoulder, cracking his neck. “The movie wasn’t terrible, though. The special effects on Nessie sucked balls, but the gore was kind of cool.”

“Of course you cared about the gore. I saw that one, too. But I read the book first, a long time ago. Maybe even before I met Myra.”

“Your wife a big horror fan?” 

Eddie can’t tell if he’s imagining the wary note to Richie’s voice.

“Oh,” he says. “No, I—I think I saw it alone. She must’ve had to work late, or something.”

If Myra had gone with him to the theater, they would have seen a different movie. The latest Oscar-bait story, or a tasteful rom-com. Horror was off-limits; too grotesque according to her standards, and sometimes for Eddie, as well. She would have been aggrieved when Eddie did not rush to assuage her fears by consoling her, an arm over her shoulder or hands entwined on the armrest. The aura of disappointment would follow them through the doors and into their home, where they’d fall asleep on separate sides of their king mattress, hardly exchanging a goodnight. Myra’s back to him. Eddie would have a nightmare, and the nightmare would have nothing to do with the film. The content of the dream would not, in truth, deviate with much excess from waking life.

Another flash cuts through the sky, and Eddie counts the seconds. He reaches five before the thunder growls. Much nearer now. He licks his lips, tasting the acrid, musky flavor of the ozone, the hint of mist that warns of the downfall to come.

“It was too long,” he agrees. “But I liked how eerie it felt before they fucked it with the CGI.”

“Oh, yeah,” Richie says. “It’s great when a movie gives you that feeling. That pit of dread that hangs around in your stomach, but you’re fine with it ‘cause you know it’s not real.” He pauses. “I remember I went into it kind of pissed because the dude I was with promised there would be Sno-Caps, but they were all out. I had to settle for stale Twizzlers at the bargain price of five American dollars.”

“You like Sno-Caps?”

“They’re my favorite, man. They’re like an endangered species now but when I see ‘em, I can’t get enough of ‘em.”

“That’s,” Eddie says, and stops.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just—I also love Sno-Caps.”

Richie smiles at him, all unencumbered softness. “Now isn’t that something.”

“But Twizzlers are also good,” Eddie hedges.

“They’re okay,” Richie says, his smile widening. Eddie can see a hint of teeth between his lips, right at the left dimple. A drop of water lands on the tip of his nose. He laughs, breath caught, and swipes it off with his knuckle.

“It’s such horseshit.” Another drop strikes Eddie’s temple and slides down his face. He lets it fall. “His name was right there. They probably said it in the opening credits, ‘Based on the book by William Denbrough,’ and I didn’t even recognize it.”

The wind picks up around them, rustling the curl of Richie’s hair over his forehead. He raises his voice as he says, “Yeah, neither did I. I don’t think that was really on us, though, Eds.”

“It just feels like cheating,” Eddie insists. “If we fought our way through everything that fucker did to make us forget, we should’ve been able to recognize each other’s names, at least. That should’ve been, like, the secret antidote to the curse.”

“It’s not like it was the labors of Hercules,” Richie says. “IT didn’t have to play by the rules. All IT had to do was give us some blinders and set the expiration date for twenty seven years down the line.”

Eddie watches more nickel-sized drops of rain litter the concrete of the road, steady moments apart. In either their third or fourth session Dr. Yang had said that belief is, in the end, imperative to progress. He won’t be able to get better if he doesn’t let himself believe that it’s possible. 

“I don’t want to be that person anymore,” he tells Richie, the words tumbling from his mouth before the thought is fully realized. “I don’t want to be half-awake. I want to be someone else.”

“Who?” Richie asks, speaking louder still. Above where they sit, the night has gone black, clouds hurtling in from the north and cloaking every star. 

It’s a question that Eddie has never quite broached with himself. Not since being a kid, if even then. Easy enough to go along with things: job, wife, expensive car, spacious Manhattan apartment, luxury watch. Easy not to think about who the man behind it all was. 

Eddie doesn’t have kids. He still reads physical newspapers. He saves them up through the week to marathon them on Saturday mornings, when Myra watches her taped shows. He has acquaintances, not friends. He’d convinced himself that adults don’t have friends. When other people talked of friends, he thought them childish. He’s never had good sex or sex he really wanted. 

He’s kind with his clients, answering their queries ten times over; he’s short with his coworkers as they ask the same questions. On bad days, he buys chocolate bars from the bodega round the corner and eats them before he comes home, sneaking in to brush his teeth as though Myra might ever approach within the right approximate range to scent it on his breath. He screams at other cars in traffic, a reaction almost involuntary in how effortlessly the scream always expands in his chest. 

Who was he? Who is he? His name is Eddie Kaspbrak, but the words lack meaning to him. As he thinks it over, Richie’s empty husk theory does not seem so awful or unreal. He was an empty husk, but then they came back to end it together, and as they sprinted out from that dead house, Eddie had felt some restive ache of sorrow that swelled swiftly inside him and evaporated just as swiftly. 

You’re free now. Eddie plays the words in his mind, ducks his head from Richie so he can shape them with his lips and tongue. You have the missing years, you know who you once were, you can be whoever you want to be. Who do you want to be, Eddie? What are you looking for?

For now, he wants only this. Richie by his side. His friends safe and unworried in the building behind him. The sugary leavings of syrup residing in patches behind his teeth. The knowledge that if he can throw one spear, he can throw another; he can keep tearing holes in his own life and stitch them back up with something durable, something all his own. 

He has time.

“If I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know,” Eddie yells over the wind.

“Using a man’s own words against him,” Richie shouts back. “That’s—” 

The thunder bellows, deafening, and the sky cleaves apart to release its downpour over their heads. Cursing, Richie pushes himself to his feet and tugs Eddie up by one hand, fingers wrapped around his in a vice. Together they run for the door of the inn, wrestling it wide against the pressurized resistance and then pulling it shut behind them. 

In the lobby, the howling outside is muffled, whistling through the windows. Their soaked clothes sag off both their frames. Eddie meets Richie’s eyes through the pinpricks of water dotting his glasses. A twitch runs through his body, electrifying like a spasm.

“I hope that wasn’t some sort of death omen,” Richie says. Wet strands of hair cling to his face. “A guy can only handle so many catastrophes at once.”

“I think we’re good, Nostradamus,” Eddie says, stripping himself of his hoodie. “It’s just a storm.”

If anything it seems to him like a good omen. If there are good omens. Maybe the end of danger is sometimes as full-throated and paralyzing as the danger itself.

“And with that,” Richie says, “I’m calling it a night.” He toes off his shoes, gripping the banister for balance. Looks up to Eddie. “See you tomorrow?”

He says it like a real question, not rhetorical: will I see you tomorrow? As though there’s a chance he’ll wake up and find Eddie gone, without having bothered to say goodbye.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Eddie tells him, firmly.

Richie nods. That sorted, he turns and hitches himself up the stairs by the railing, mismatched socks (pizza slices, navy blue) squelching on the carpet with each step. Eddie stands in place a while, holding his hoodie. Then he follows Richie upstairs, towels off his hair, and pulls on his pajama bottoms.

In bed, he lies on his back as the walls creak and moan around him. Down the hallway, someone is snoring, trailing murmurs. Not Richie. He never snored when they were young. Only they’re adults now, and there are countless truths about this new Richie that he has yet to learn. It was never Sno-Caps back then; it was buttery popcorn and soda, and Richie would gripe but still tilt the bucket toward Eddie and let him steal half the contents when his mother refused him an allowance to spend on his own movie snacks, as she did most weeks.

If Eddie tries, he can uncover all the cogs and pieces that warp and coalesce to form the man that Richie is at forty. He can study them, memorize them. Carve out a hollow in his brain for their impressions to remain undisturbed and pristine. He can know this Richie as well and as deeply as he knew the Richie of before. He can know him more deeply.

A few rooms away, Richie is sleeping. Eddie thinks of it: his long form sprawled under the covers, his damp hair, breath light in the air, cheek indenting the pillow. He hangs on to the image limned bright on the black of his eyelids as he slips under, and he does not feel so alone.

There’s a knock on Eddie’s door in the morning as he packs the last of his clothes. 

“Come in,” Eddie calls. He shuts one colossal bag with his finger tucked under the zipper. Saving the cotton of his shirts from getting snagged in the metal teeth.

At the sound of ice tinkling, Eddie looks over his shoulder to spy Beverly leaning against the wall behind him. In her hand is a knock-off crystal tumbler. Two fingers of whiskey. With more practiced subtlety, Eddie glances at the bedside alarm clock: thirty-three minutes past eleven.

Squinting, she points at him, revealing the blanched empty space on her knuckle where her ring had once been. “No judgment,” she says sternly. “I don’t want to hear a single word.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything!” Eddie protests, though he had been thinking it.

Beverly grimaces, knocking her head back on the mottled yellow plaster. “If you can believe it,” she deadpans, “that was meant to be a joke. Sorry. I guess I’m just feeling antsy today. I needed something to, you know—” She exhales, bringing her hand out from her chest in a steady line.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eddie tells her. “I’ve already unpacked and repacked all my suitcases. Twice.”

She acknowledges the admission with a thin smile. “I’m trying to quit,” she confides, eye for an eye. “Not that I drank a ton before, but. I think I leant on it sometimes, when things with Tom got . . .”

Bev trails off, staring to Eddie’s left. He waits. 

“I threw myself into my work a lot,” she says finally. “That and the cigarettes. Which I’m also trying to quit.” Idly, she dips the glass back and forth. Amber liquid sloshes along the sides, the ice cubes clattering and ringing like tiny bells.

“We all have our vices,” Eddie says, grim, more grim than he’d like. In his other bag he’d taken four spare toothbrushes and three quarters of the medicine cabinet from home. He’d tossed his inhaler into the ritual flames. At least Bev had been aware her vices were vices. Eddie would have insisted the pills were his savior to the grave.

“Are you alright?” Bev asks. “You seem a little—”

“What?” 

She regards him, green eyes unflappable. “Haunted.”

Eddie takes this in. Swivels around again, busies himself with the pockets and zips of his luggage. Earlier he’d awoken and, in a flurry of dread, crammed his clothes from the cistern and then the stabbing into his travel laundry bag. Double-tied it, stashed it in the corner of the room to be discarded before he passed through the automatic doors of the airport. He wouldn’t be able to withstand seeing them again in a closet, amongst his other things, sullied.

“I’m fine,” he replies. He smooths a crease in the bedspread. “I just want to get out of here.”

“Is it weird that a part of me doesn’t really want to go?” Beverly asks, nerves creeping into her voice, tapering it upwards. 

“Is it weird you don’t want to leave the place that almost murdered us? Uh, yeah, Bev, most people would probably consider it a little messed up.” Eddie draws the lid down on the second suitcase. “But I don’t think it’s about wanting to stay here,” he says. “None of us want to leave each other again. And we’re all messed up, so who cares.”

“Are you worried at all?” she says. “That we’ll forget?”

A bird warbles out the window, same song as in the night with the curb and the storm. Eddie had been the last one downstairs, somehow. They all traipsed through the languid beams of mid-morning sun to the diner, and Eddie’s heart raced as they arranged themselves around two shoved-together tables. Palms sweating, he felt conspicuous as he wiped them on his jeans. And irritated, because he’d no idea what he was being so vigilant for. What did it matter if the others knew they’d been there, just the two of them?

But then Richie had shot him a look across the table, sparkling, amused. Took a menu and perused it thoughtfully as Eddie straightened and poured cream into his coffee from the little silver pitcher, the others unsuspecting as they talked around them. 

A tacit agreement, an alliance. Eddie liked it. He couldn’t say why, but he did, the secret theirs alone.

Bill and Richie would return to California. Mike had already started planning for Florida, stretches of highway and roaming fields and citrus trees. Eddie muffled the words _New York_ into his scrambled eggs. And Beverly—

“We won’t let each other forget,” he says, turning to her. “And you’re going with Ben, right? If worst comes to worst, you can help each other remember.”

She downs most of her glass, swipes at her mouth. “I kissed him.”

“I saw. In the quarry. Are you guys—?”

“I don’t know,” Bev says, quick. “We saved each other’s lives. We were paired up together in the caves, with Pennywise, just like you and Richie.”

_Just like me and Richie_. Eddie curls his hand into a fist to hide the trembling.

“It was a nice kiss,” she says, in wonder. Her face crumples. “I don’t know how I feel about him. I’d never thought about him that way before yesterday, at all. But when he offered to let me stay with him, I said yes. I wasn’t even thinking about what it would do to him. Do you think that’s cruel?”

“Fuck, no,” Eddie snaps. “Jesus. Of course not. Ben didn’t ask you to go with him out of some fucking—romantic get-the-girl attempt at entrapment. He’s not going to put you out on the street if you don’t love him back. He offered because he wanted you to have somewhere to go. He _wanted_ you to think about yourself. Cruel is something you’ve never been, Beverly.”

“Oh, believe me,” she says. “I have.”

Eddie steps forward. Touch is an intricate, mercurial language, and his acuity for its endless refracting meanings and gestures, unhoned. But he takes Beverly’s fingers to squeeze between his own, his wedding band gold against her taut-white knuckles.

“Yeah,” he tells her. “So have I.”

She blinks, wetly. “Not really cruel, Eddie. In the way that cuts just to hurt. I grew up with it, I married it, I know what it looks like in other people. I think you know it, too.”

Bared to her sharp scrutiny, Eddie swallows.

“You saved him,” she says. “Look what you did. He might be dead without you.”

“Look what you did, Bev. You made us all brave. And you helped me clean my stab wound when I thought I was gonna pass out.”

“Oh, God.” Beverly laughs. She swings their hands. “I had no fucking idea what I was doing. You’re lucky I didn’t make it worse.”

In the timid plane of exposure between them, the door barely ajar, insulated from any urgent or more harrowing concern, it seems as though he could tell her anything and have it be alright. Entranced, his mind swims with the heady rush that precedes confession, precedes honesty, what he’d told Richie on the sidewalk, _I’m sick of never telling people anything._

He’d meant it. He wasn’t sure he had at the time, but here in this room, the rightness of it is irrefutable.

“I’m leaving my wife,” he says. “When I get back to New York. I’m telling her I want a divorce, and then I’m leaving.”

A stinging coldness lurches over him in the immediate gap of time after he speaks it aloud: too late, you’ve done it now, no walking it back. Eddie teeters in that gap, the imbalance of having made a decision, and then Beverly encloses him in her arms and presses their faces together, cheek to cheek. He hugs her back, tightly. He can’t remember the last time he hugged someone.

“Good on you, Eds,” she praises, quiet in his ear. “No more time wasted for either of us.”

“Eds?” He holds her out with both hands on her waist. “Not you, too. You can’t give into him, Bev. We can’t let him win.”

Beverly rolls her eyes. “If you need a place to stay, let me know. We’ll figure it out. That is, if you ever wanna leave the city for a bit. God knows I need a break.”

A break from New York. The place he’d lived decades. A place he loved. Nebraska, or maybe California where Ben rents a beach house part of the year. Los Angeles where he’d be close to the others—Bill, and, of course, Richie. Alien land he’s never once visited.

“I might take you up on that,” Eddie says, and Bev flicks him on the chin, yanks him down that slight distance to peck him over his eyebrow.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Richie says from the doorway. “Looks like I’m walking in on something _very_ fun.”

Eddie extricates himself from Bev’s grip. 

Door nudged open, Richie looks back and forth between them, the strap of his duffle bag laced over one shoulder. “Am I interrupting? Should I pop some champagne or do you guys need a third?”

“Fuck off, Trashmouth,” Bev says, and she pulls Richie in to smack a kiss on his face as well, neglecting his pretend scowl. “Let me know,” she repeats to Eddie, and then she slips out, leaving him to the full force of Richie’s graces.

“She’s in a good mood today,” Richie observes. 

“She is now. What’s with the bag? Are you leaving already?”

He adjusts the duffle against his side. “Yeah, dude. Packed up all by myself and everything. No assistance necessary, like a real adult man.”

“Do you have your ticket?” 

“On my phone.” Richie taps his jeans pocket.

“What about your ID?” Eddie presses. “Sometimes people accidentally pack it _in_ their bags, and then when they get to the kiosk—”

“Jeezus Louisus, Eddie,” Richie says. “You know I fly, like, on the regular? For my job? As a touring comedian? Cross my heart and hope to die, I haven’t left my wallet behind in _at least_ three months.” When Eddie doesn’t respond, he continues: “That was a joke. You get that, right? It’s important to me that you get that, Eddie.”

“No, I’m having trouble,” Eddie says. “Why don’t you explain it to me some more.”

“First the concern for my well-being. Then the thinly veiled threat.” 

“That wasn’t a threat. I’ll show you a threat.”

“Nah, don’t,” Richie advises him. “Mull it over. Workshop it. Keep it up your polo sleeve for later, when I’m not expecting it. That way you can really bring me to my knees.”

“You’re always expecting it,” Eddie says. Used to expect it, he means. 

“Yeah, I am,” Richie says, a marginal lift to the corner of his mouth. “And you still always surprise me.”

They look at each other. It hits Eddie then: he won’t see Richie tomorrow. A nonsense urge arises inside him to do something. Wring his hands, get to his knees instead and rend Richie’s garments, plead with him to stay, if solely for a few more precarious moments. Cartoon anvil to the head, he’s cognizant of the similarities between that imagined version of himself and Myra, begging him not to leave her for Derry. _You don’t know what you’re doing, Eddie, you don’t know what you’re thinking, you have to stay here, you just have to, Eddie darling, so I can protect you._

From what? The world, other people, the creature she’d no corporeal knowledge of but could see reflected in the dilation of his pupils? Doesn’t matter, because at the rancid core of it all is Eddie. Eddie, who needs to be protected from himself.

He should tell Richie that he’s leaving her. He should tell him now. 

“Listen,” Eddie says, “don’t be a stranger.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Richie asks. “I just got you back. You think I’m gonna disappear into the ether? After all,” enunciating and serious, “family means nobody gets left behind.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Come on, you don’t know _Lilo & Stitch_?” Richie complains. “You have no culture.”

“You can ride my ass about it later,” Eddie says. 

He inches closer, running through his options. Nod at Richie. Shake his hand as if he’s a client (moronic, mortifying). Stare at him like a helpless infant deer until Richie steers him in the proper direction or saunters out the door, untouched. If Eddie focuses he can feel the stubborn imprint from Richie’s stroking along his wrist in the late hours of the night. A marking.

An imperceptible inkling of emotion winks across Richie’s face. Before Eddie can play it off, Richie folds a loose arm around him and claps him on the back. A cursory hug, not personable, not like Beverly’s embrace, and then it’s done.

“See you, Eds,” Richie says. He hefts the bag farther up on his shoulder. “Really soon, yeah?”

“Yeah, man,” Eddie agrees. “Of course.”

Richie knocks twice on the wood of the doorframe and walks out. His footsteps amble heavy down the stairs. Eddie hears his voice rise and fall as he says his goodbyes to someone else—Mike, by the sound of it, and Beverly. The telltale whine of the front entrance, once and then again as it shuts.

Later, as Eddie aims his rental car toward the Bangor International Airport, he pulls an 80s pop playlist up on Spotify and sings along to _Time After Time_. Indistinct at first, but soon throwing himself into it with whole-hearted, off-key fervor. On the damp street, sunlight shines off splotches of dappled rainbow color, a hazy luminosity. 

He throws out his bloody clothes. He gets on the plane. He looks through the window to the expanse of blue sky, carrying him fast toward his old life so he can start his new one, frightfully unobstructed and rife with fresh potential. Eddie closes his eyes and lets it come.

**Author's Note:**

> It got stormy outside as I was editing this chapter, which felt appropriately serendipitous.
> 
> Thank you for reading! You can talk to me on twitter [@hintricates](https://twitter.com/hintricates).


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